


The Darkness in Each Other

by AgentMaryMargaretSkitz



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: A group chat enabled me and I love them, Alternate Season/Series 02, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bounty Hunters, Can I call it that?, Crack Treated Seriously, Darkness, Leonard Snart Lives, Ray died at the Oculus, This is why you should not come up with ideas at 2 am, the darkest timeline, what have I done?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-28
Updated: 2018-09-28
Packaged: 2019-07-18 13:37:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,160
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16119563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AgentMaryMargaretSkitz/pseuds/AgentMaryMargaretSkitz
Summary: What if Mick Rory never returned to the team? What if he stayed Chronos and continued to pursue revenge on the Legends, even after the destruction of the Oculus? What if he found out about Lily Stein and got to her before the Legends sought her out for help?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MissCrazyWriter321](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissCrazyWriter321/gifts).



> Full blame goes to MissCrazyWriter321 for sending me: NEVERMIND MY LAST ASK, may I request Mick/Lily where Mick is Chronos, and Lily is a time aberration he's sent to eliminate, but he falls in love with her instead?
> 
> I wrote the fic. And then I wrote another because this idea awoke and attacked me again.
> 
> Now I'm working on a third ficlet. So here's to you for making sure I got grabbed and pulled into this hole. I love you, you stinking awesome human being.

He knew the team were screw-ups, but creating an aberration? It makes Chronos shake his head at their stupidity. But he has to laugh when he finds out it was the professor’s fault. How high and mighty is the old man feeling now?

The Legends are now trying to keep time and history on the right course, but they’re sloppy. In all his years, he’s never seen such a disaster. Even in his first years as Chronos, he never screwed up this bad, although continual screw-ups meant termination in the worst way. One would think they would have learned their lesson about getting in over their heads after what happened to Haircut.

(Sometimes Chronos lets himself be Mick and misses the man. The longest he lets himself mourn is five minutes so he doesn’t get weak)

If the Legends won’t stop ruining the timeline, then he’ll try to keep it intact. He travels to 2017 and kidnaps the aberration (she keeps insisting her name is ‘Lily’). Chronos brings her back to the ship and gets the fabricator working to build a weapon.

“Why are you doing this?” she demands from where she’s handcuffed to a part of the ship, out of reach of any weapons.

He doesn’t answer her, but she keeps asking. She’s crying, but she’s not begging for her life. Got her father’s stubbornness, that’s for sure.

Finally, he gives in and tells her. “You shouldn’t exist.”

“That’s not completely cryptic at all,” the aberration mutters. “If I’m going to die, then I want to know why, and that answer isn’t going to cut it.”

Chronos turns around. “When I knew your dad, he didn’t have kids. Then he went back in time and talked to a younger version. That guy changed time, and poof, you appear.”

She goes quiet after that. He expects denial, but instead he gets “You knew my father?”

“Sure, before he agreed to let me die in the middle of a forest,” he snarls. “Then he and the idiot group of heroes blew up the only timeline control. Now they’re messing up history everywhere. I’m trying to stop them while keeping the damn timeline intact.”

“All by yourself?”

“Sure, kid.”

The aberration frowns for a moment. “Let me help you keep time from breaking apart.”

He barks out a laugh. “Funny.”

“I’m serious,” she huffs. “Besides, if I’m an aberration that’s messing everything up, wouldn’t it make sense to keep me out of history so I don’t impact it?”

It’s actually a really good point. Chronos lowers the weapon he had just picked up. He’s read up on the aberration, this Lily Stein. She’s brilliant beyond belief. The part of Mick Rory that served as a brute force still is dominant within him. He needs a planner, a brains to his operation to stop the Legends.

“You really wanna help?” he asked cautiously.

“Hey, if I save the world by staying out of it, it works,” Lily shrugs. “What do you say? Partners?”

Chronos makes his decision and walks over to her. He unlocks the handcuffs from her wrists. Lily rubs the skin for a moment as Chronos extends his hand.

“Partners,” he agrees as she shakes his hand. “Now, let’s get to work, Junior.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lily's perspective on meeting Chronos, and what happens in the months that follow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wrote this at the beginning of the month, but this idea is attacking me again and I'm decided to post these on AO3 now.

Getting kidnapped by someone who looked like they walked right off a movie set for some futuristic sci-fi flick was unexpected. Of all the days she could have forgotten her pepper spray, it had to be on that day. Not that it would have helped with the helmet her kidnapper wore. She didn’t even stand a chance before he knocked her out.

When she woke up on the spaceship, handcuffed to a railing, Lily thought of all the stories she had read on the news about women who went missing. Fear that she would become some unsolved true crime story struck her soon after. If she was going to die, then she wanted to know why. She asked her kidnapper, and he told her.

At first, she didn’t want to believe that she wasn’t supposed to exist. Then Lily remembered the last time she’d seen her father, back when the aliens had invaded Central City. He had treated her as if he had never seen her before, and it had hurt. It made sense that he came from a timeline where she didn’t exist, encountered his past self, and said something that lead to her happening. He had been a huge part of her life, but she was just a stranger to him.

Offering to join forces with her kidnapper, this Chronos, was initially a play at survival. If she stayed out of time and worked to save history, then it was more time to live and plan out her next moves. Maybe she could even guarantee her existence if she did enough. But there was a bitterness inside her when she thought about how she was an aberration, a product of history not going the way it was supposed to.

If helping Chronos brought her face to face with her father, she was going to take the chance to ask him some questions about what had happened that brought her into existence.

* * *

 

Striking the deal with Lily Stein to let her live and work with him to stop the Legends from the mess they were making of history turned out to be one of his better ideas. There was plenty of Haircut in her with her determination and intellect, not to mention a relatively sunny attitude. She picked up information about dealing with the timeline quickly and made herself useful in how to rectify damage that had been dealt to a time period. Chronos figured she was probably only working with him to survive, but keeping her alive was a means to an end.

But he didn’t mind having her on the ship with him. He was usually a lone wolf, yet he got along with her. Somehow, Lily (or Junior, as he’d nicknamed her) found a chink in his armor to befriend him. More of Mick Rory started to come back in to mix with the bounty hunter persona of Chronos. The strange part about it was he didn’t mind it happening at all.

When his ship landed in the same time period as the Legends, he ordered Junior to stay put and monitor from inside the ship. It ended up being a good move when he encountered the Legends. A fight broke out, ending with Snart and one of the new members, Amaya Jiwe, kicking his ass. As the Legends dragged him back to the Waverider, he spat a remark about how it was their fault for creating the aberrations in time, that they lacked precision in their correction. To his surprise, Stein was the one who responded.

“We had to destroy the Time Masters, even if they were keeping these aberrations in check. But we intend to fix them.”

The professor didn’t even know his own daughter was listening through the damn comm in his helmet. Hell, even Mick didn’t think she was listening until he heard it click off. The kid raised an eyebrow at the professor once he said that, but his rectification of ‘almost all of them’ was missed when Junior stopped listening. Moments later, his ship flew overhead and weapons were fired at the Legends. In the chaos, Mick made his escape to his ship and took over the controls to pilot them somewhere they could regroup.

After that aberration is corrected, a change occurred in Junior. She became colder and sharper. Her positive attitude diminished nearly completely. Eventually, she wanted to be trained to fight, claiming she was sick and tired of being stuck on the ship monitoring and planning. Mick suspected she was starting to want to seek some kind of revenge on the Legends. Still, he started to teach her what he knew. If she got good enough, then she could have his back when they inevitably fought the Legends again.

* * *

 

“We’ve got bad news.”

“How bad?” Sara sighed as she and Nate wandered past another shack on the plains. The latest aberration was located in Oklahoma 1934. Dust storms were supposed to be ravaging the Great Plains, except history now said they didn’t. Something had affected the soil so it didn’t become…well, dust. They figured it was something from the future, like the virus that had caused a zombie outbreak in the Civil War.

Things had gotten worse in the past few months. Not only did they have Mick coming after them constantly for revenge, but a new group of enemies had showed up. When the Legends did find Rip in the sixties, this new Legion of Doom had snatched him away and brainwashed him to work with them. To top it all off, Stein’s suggestion of having his daughter help connect the amulet with the Waverider was derailed when they returned to 2017 to learn she had gone missing.

“Not only did Gideon pick up speedster activity,” Leonard’s voice floated through the comms. “But she also picked up another timeship close by. So Mick’s here to try and fix this problem now too, not to mention try and kill us again.”

“Fantastic,” Sara groaned, pinching her nose.

“Hey, we might not run into them?” Nate offered as the brush on their path became a little greener.

“Don’t say that,” Sara muttered. Not only would he jinx them, but it reminded her too much of something Ray might say. It had been months since he’d given his life at the Oculus. Nate was similar to their departed teammate in a lot of ways, and Sara could only imagine how well those two would have gotten along.

“We just need to find what’s causing this and get out of here before we cross one of them again,” Jax said.

“Yeah,” Sara stopped as she saw the grass actually looking greener on the other side of a fence. “We might have found it.”

She got herself over the fence, following the green towards a small shack. Nate followed her, steeling up. Pushing the door open, they were met with a strange silvery contraption with three prongs buried in the ground. A tube above the prongs glowed leaf green.

Half the work was done. “Len, we found-”

A clang rung out behind her. Whirling around, she saw Nate’s hand in front of her face. Beyond that, there was a familiar figure in a suit of armor, rifle in hand. Sara inhaled quickly, realizing how close she was to getting shot in the head. But she was still alive and was going to fight her way out of here if she had to.

“Get that out of the ground,” she ordered Nate. “Len, Amaya, get the Waverider here now. Stein, Jax, I need back-up.”

Sara flicked out her batons and formed her staff. She managed to keep Mick distracted for long enough until the Waverider hovered above them. Firestorm came out first, followed by Leonard and Amaya. The latter went over to help Nate while Leonard took a place beside Sara and Firestorm to hold off Chronos until Nate and Amaya could get the thing out of the ground. For a while, it looked like they could pull it off.

“Give it up, Mick!” Leonard shouted as he froze Mick’s rifle. “There’s something worse out there that is an actual threat to reality!”

“I know about the Legion,” Mick’s voice rumbled from inside. “We intend to make sure they get what’s coming to them next.”

Jax frowned. “We?”

“I brought a friend.”

Behind them, Nate shouted out. Those fighting Mick turned to see him and Amaya lying on the ground. Between them was a figure picking up the pronged device. They were dressed in armor like Chronos, but the helmet and design were different. The figure tilted their head at them all for a moment.

“Hello, Legends,” a modulated female voice regarded. “I’ve been waiting quite a while to meet you.”

She threw something into the air. Sara didn’t see what it was before a blinding flash exploded from it. A second later, she felt her consciousness slip away.

* * *

 

With the Legends all unconscious, Mick summoned his timeship and took hold of the device they’d found. He’d seen it in the Vanishing Point before. Apparently it was used in the 22nd century to cultivate sustainable life in areas plagued by drought. Now that they had it, the plains would deteriorate to the state they should be in, the dust storms could ravage the people trying to make a living there, and Steinbeck would write the Grapes of Wrath.

“You did good back there,” he muttered as he piloted the ship into the temporal zone while his companion undid her mask.

“I did say I would help you,” Lily reminded him, brushing some dust from the lenses of the mask. “So, this Legion of Doom…do we have a plan?”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Leave Kudos/Reviews!
> 
> (Also shoutout to @misscrazyfangirl321 for helping me pick out a name for bounty hunter Lily- Era)


End file.
